The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed subject matter.
Many end-user consumers including residential consumers and business consumers connect to the Internet by way of broadband technologies. Broadband technologies can include, for example, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), fiber, cable, WiFi, cellular, and microwave technologies. A given broadband technology can have widely varying performance due to a number of factors. The term “performance” herein refers generally to throughput, latency, jitter, connectivity, error rates, power consumption, transmit power, etc. Information about the performance of broadband technologies for end-consumers is typically collected privately by service providers and is not publicly available.
For example, with Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technologies, a service provider provides its end-users with Internet bandwidth, at least a portion of which is carried over copper twisted pair telephone lines. The twisted wire pair infrastructure is known as the “loop plant.” Information about the loop plant, such as the physical termination location of the loop and performance information for the loop, is traditionally property of the internet service provider (ISP) and associated local loop unbundling (LLU) providers. Thus, loop plant information is typically not publicly available. Additionally, the collection of loop plant information can be time consuming and costly due to the method of data collection. For example, service providers typically send technicians on site to make measurements. Furthermore, the value of the loop plant information maintained by service providers or others depends on the data collection and record keeping practices. Therefore, loop plant information may not be up-to-date or may be inaccurate in other ways. Information records for other broadband technologies have similar drawbacks.
The present state of the art may benefit from apparatuses, systems, and methods of automatically generating broadband information records without requiring service provider or user involvement that are described herein.